A Grape Injustice

The clerk at Wine Authorities welcomes a typical Dani Durham to the store’s upbeat, quirky showroom and helps her select a Pinot Grigio he says will go nicely with her dinner that evening. You know, normal wine-store stuff.

But beyond those individual sales, there exists a somewhat startling, grander goal. Wine Authorities is a definite outlier in the wine world, with an owner who dons the nickname “Grand Poobah Wine Swami”—perhaps to throw off his enemy—while he mounts an all-out counter-attack against “the box store invasion.”

The owner, Craig Heffley, and his then-business partner opened Wine Authorities in late 2007 in an unassuming, reddish-brown strip mall off University Drive. Situated three miles southeast of Duke’s West Campus, the wine oasis known for its free Saturday tastings and wine dispenser is just a grape’s throw away from Local Yogurt, a popular undergraduate sweet spot.

Towerview’s Alex Klein sat on a couch at Wine Authorities to speak with Heffley, a bespectacled, just-barely-fortysomething North Carolinian, about the wine industry’s dirty secrets, the Vine to Wine movement, and The Matrix.

Towerview: Wine Authorities has an anti-establishment feel. Who or what are you up against?

Craig Heffley: Wine is traded like a commodity. You can go and say, “I need this many tons of this grape,” and there are people that will sell it to you. It can be either finished wine, ready to go, that you can tweak your own way or you can buy grapes on the open market. That’s the way the wine industry has been going and a lot of these small producers are getting lost in the shuffle because at one time, everybody got the opportunity to sell in grocery stores and wine stores. These days, those big companies—the big importers and distributors—have become stronger and stronger and they have actually forced most of the small businesses out of the grocery stores, especially.

When you go to a grocery store these days, 95 percent of the wines that are there are actually from about eight or nine large companies. In general, it’s become very corporate dominated.

TV: This reminds me of the outrage that helped drive the Farm to Fork movement that has gained traction nationally and is huge in the Triangle area. Are there parallels?

CH: Most of the people who are in the Farm to Fork movement will still go to Trader Joe’s and buy some wine. It’s just getting that switch to click in their head.

One of the biggest problems is you have these chefs who do the whole thing where they know the farmer who supplies them with their beets and greens and pork and they really tout all of that, and they work really hard to make people aware of where this product comes from. All the ingredients are from local people and they name them and everything. And then you look at their wine list and it’s just the worst offense possible because they don’t pay the same kind of attention to where their wine comes from.

TV: The Farm to Fork movement, many argue, has forced food prices higher. The prices in your store are similar to prices at supermarkets and other wine shops. How are you, champion of the Vine to Wine movement, able to compete on price?

CH: With wine, the big producers are, in general, making wine from the cheapest product possible, and then they market and create brands based on price-points. So you can pay $20 for a bottle of big-brand wine and you can also pay $8 or $9 for a brand from the same winery. It could have started off as the exact same juice. It’s just they have different price-points, and the way they manipulate and finish those wines makes one taste like it’s much more expensive and the other taste like it’s an everyday drinker.

France, Italy, Spain, Germany—those areas have a really long history of making wine and the land is passed down from generation to generation. Everything is pretty much set up. You don’t have a lot of start-up costs. All you have to do is maintain it and upgrade here and there.

In the U.S., making wine is a prestigious thing. If you go to Europe, being a winemaker is seen like being a postman, a plumber. It’s an everyday thing. And so they don’t feel like they need to sell their wine so they can be a superstar in their neighborhood or to make a lot of money or buy an expensive place. They’re really the keepers of the land and the tradition.

Wine in Europe is seen as something that everybody drinks. In the U.S., for the last 50 years or so, it’s been seen as something that is for the wealthy, for the educated. We are trying to get away from that. We’re trying harder and harder to bring everyday people into it. You can get an honest product for $10 that’s made by a farmer, that’s not adulterated, that tastes great and is fun.

TV: Do you think you’ve made a store that can satisfy non-traditional customers—“everyday people,” as you said—as well as traditional ones?

CH: We don’t want to be that preachy wine store but we do want people to know about [the origins of their wine]. That’s another reason we’ve worked just as hard to make the store comfortable and inviting and fun and friendly, because you don’t want to drag people down the whole time. You want to market and package the store in a comfy, fun kind of environment.

Wine stores have always been stodgy and stuffy and dark and they’ve always been catered toward male consumers. Women buy most of the wine in this country and wine stores just aren’t hip to that. They’re still stuck in that tunnel of, “This is how wine stores have to be.”

We don’t carry wines over $50 a bottle and that’s one of the things that’s a distinguishing point for us because there are not any other wine stores in the Triangle that do that. The reason we did that is because once you go over $50 a bottle, what you’re paying for is either demand or a specific flavor, but you’re not necessarily paying for a quality increase.

TV: So, do you own the best wine store in the country?

CH: Our average quality of the wines in the store is higher than any other. Quality for value, ours is the best in the country. o